Chapter 156: The Scream [21]

"Then come and fight," Ryan said. "Show me what you’ve gained by giving up everything that made you human. Prove that your betrayal was worth the price you paid."

A profound silence fell over the ruined landscape, broken only by the regular transmissions of the artificial screams that Mark’s devices continued broadcasting throughout Jackson Township. The mechanical wailing formed a discordant backdrop to the confrontation, rhythmic pulses of synthetic sound that echoed off buildings and bounced through empty streets, serving their intended purpose of confusing the infected which was working very well.

Rachel, who had maneuvered the camping van backward to establish a safer distance from the confrontation, felt genuine surprise and concern blossom in her chest as Ryan’s words registered. She’d known Ryan for months now—had fought alongside him, survived impossible situations with him, come to understand his personality and patterns and the way his mind worked under pressure.

And this was wrong.

Ryan was usually calm and controlled even in the most dangerous situations, approaching problems with measured responses that prioritized efficiency over emotional satisfaction. He didn’t taunt enemies. He didn’t issue challenges. He certainly didn’t intentionally forgo using his most powerful ability just to make a fight more "fair" or prove some kind of point.

This wasn’t the Ryan she knew...

Cindy, still catching her breath after dragging Christopher’s unconscious form into the van, felt similar confusion and worry gnawing at her as she listened to Ryan’s cold voice. Her hands gripped the van’s interior doorframe tightly enough to make her knuckles ache.

"Ryan..." She muttered with concern thick in her voice, her blue eyes locked on his distant figure standing alone in the firelight. She wanted to call out to him, to ask if he was okay, to somehow bridge the strange distance that seemed to separate him from everything and everyone around him.

He’d always been somewhat distant by nature—reserved and self-contained in ways that made him difficult to read even for those who knew him well. But despite that inherent distance, Ryan’s presence had always radiated a certain warmth, a fundamental aliveness in his eyes that suggested engagement with the world even when he held himself apart from it.

But right now, he felt fundamentally different. Cold in a way that went beyond mere emotional detachment. Empty in a way that suggested something essential had been hollowed out and removed, leaving only a shell that mimicked human behavior without truly embodying it.

"It’s because of what happened to Jasmine," Wanda spoke then. She sat in the back of the van with her arms crossed.

"What happened to her?" Rachel asked immediately, whipping her head around to stare at Wanda with wide, shocked eyes.

Cindy swallowed hard, her throat suddenly tight with emotion as the memories of what she’d seen earlier came flooding back with visceral clarity. "Jasmine... she’s been turned into an infected," she explained. "We saw her when Jason appeared. She was with him, transformed. Her skin, her eyes... but her face was still recognizable enough that we knew."

She paused, taking a shaky breath before continuing. "Jason said that Ryan and Jasmine went to look for him because they were worried. They thought he might be in trouble, in danger from the infected or trapped somewhere. But it was all a trap. Jason had set it up, using himself as bait to lure them into a situation where..." Her voice broke slightly. "Where Jasmine got bitten. Where she was infected and transformed right in front of Ryan while he could do nothing to stop it."

Rachel felt her entire world tilt sideways as the full implications of Cindy’s words crashed through her defenses. Her eyes widened with genuine horror and grief, pupils dilating as adrenaline and shock flooded her system simultaneously.

Jasmine.

Kind, gentle Jasmine who had always been so caring and thoughtful despite everything they’d all endured. Who’d confessed her feelings to Ryan with shy courage that had made everyone who knew about it smile with bittersweet hope. Who’d worked tirelessly to help maintain the group’s morale and cohesion even when things seemed darkest.

That Jasmine—vibrant and alive and so very human—was gone. Transformed into one of the mindless infected, her consciousness erased and replaced with nothing but hunger and the alien virus’s drive to spread and consume.

Rachel’s hands clenched into fists on her lap, fingers digging into her palms hard enough that her nails broke skin and drew blood. Her eyes turned red despite her attempts to maintain composure, hot moisture blurring her vision and threatening to spill over in tracks down her soot-stained cheeks.

Then Ryan must have witnessed Jasmine’s transformation firsthand. Must have seen the bite happen, watched the infection spread, witnessed the moment when her eyes clouded over and her humanity disappeared forever. And he’d been helpless to prevent it—trapped by circumstances or timing or simple cruel fate, forced to watch someone he cared about die and resurrect as a monster while he could do nothing but bear witness to the tragedy.

Just by imagining it, Rachel felt profound pain radiating through her chest on Ryan’s behalf. She knew him well enough to understand how deeply such an experience would cut. Ryan was someone who cared intensely despite his reserved exterior—someone who carried responsibility for others like a physical weight, who blamed himself when people under his protection were hurt or killed, who took every failure personally even when logic dictated he’d done everything possible.

To watch Jasmine—someone who’d confessed feelings to him, someone he’d developed a bond with—transform into an infected while he stood powerless... it would have been devastating. Soul-crushing. The kind of trauma that could fundamentally alter someone’s psychological landscape and leave scars that might never fully heal.

Rachel turned her gaze back to Ryan’s distant figure, seeing him now through the lens of this new understanding. The coldness in his eyes, the strange disconnection from his normal behavioral patterns—all of it suddenly made terrible sense.

Jason’s expression had contorted into something ugly and twisted as Ryan’s challenge penetrated his consciousness. The provocation cut deeper than any physical wound—struck at something fundamental in whatever remained of his original self buried beneath layers of alien transformation.

His face cycled through several emotions in rapid succession: shock giving way to anger, anger transmuting into rage, rage settling finally into cold determination. The silver stone in his chest pulsed faster now, responding to his emotional state, energy flowing through him in visible waves that made his skin seem to glow from within.

"You want a fight?" Jason’s voice emerged as a snarl, layered and distorted by the alien influence. "You think you can beat me without using your cheat ability? Fine. I’ll show you exactly how much better I’ve become. I’ll prove that everything I sacrificed was worth it by crushing you into the ground!"

"You sacrificed nothing but everything that counted for you," Ryan said coldly.

He wanted Jason to understand it, he wanted Jason to suffer by it.

He hadn’t sacrificed anything of value to gain his power—he’d only traded away the things that actually mattered. His humanity. His friendships. His conscience. His soul, if such a thing existed. All discarded like worthless trash in exchange for alien strength that was already destroying him from the inside out.

"SHUT UP!!" Jason’s scream was raw with fury and something that might have been shame buried deep beneath layers of alien influence and self-justification. The words tore from his throat with such violence that his vocal cords felt like they might shred, the silver stone in his chest flaring brilliantly as it channeled his rage into additional power.

Without waiting for any response, Jason exploded forward in a rush of enhanced speed, his body covering the distance between himself and Ryan with frightening velocity. His feet barely seemed to touch the ground, each stride propelling him forward with momentum that would have been impossible for a normal human to generate or control.

Ryan also took a step forward, moving to meet Jason’s charge rather than retreating or dodging. The decision spoke volumes about his mental state—someone thinking tactically might have used evasive maneuvers to wear down an opponent who was clearly injured and emotionally compromised. But Ryan wasn’t interested in tactics or efficiency right now. He wanted confrontation. Collision. The visceral satisfaction of direct combat.

Jason’s lips twisted into a confident smirk as he launched his attack—a combination technique he’d been developing since gaining the Screamer’s power. His right fist shot forward with all his enhanced strength behind it, aimed directly at Ryan’s face with killing intent. But simultaneously, his mouth opened slightly and he released a Scream—not the full devastating sonic assault he was capable of, but a fast, concentrated burst of sound precisely timed to coincide with his punch.

It was a clever tactic. The mini-scream wouldn’t cause serious damage, but it would disrupt Ryan’s concentration and sensory processing at the exact moment when split-second timing was crucial for defense. Even a fraction of a second’s hesitation would be enough for Jason’s fist to connect with devastating force.

Ryan’s eyes twitched slightly as the sonic attack washed over him, muscles around his orbital sockets spasming involuntarily in response to the assault on his inner ear and equilibrium. The sound bypassed his ears and struck directly at his brain stem, triggering involuntary reactions that threatened to compromise his motor control.

Even though he’d managed to recover somewhat during his journey back to the house, that didn’t mean Ryan had fully restored his depleted Dullahan energy reserves. His body was a map of injuries accumulated during the brutal fight at the radio station—he’d broken multiple bones against the Enhanced Infected’s attacks, his ribs cracked from impacts that would have killed a normal human outright, his arms fractured in places from blocking strikes that carried superhuman force.

And then there had been the barbed wire. The memory was visceral and immediate despite his emotional shutdown—the sensation of metal barbs tearing through flesh as he’d forced his way through in his desperate attempt to reach Jason. His entire body had been lacerated, skin peeled back in strips, muscles exposed to air and contamination, blood loss severe enough that he should probably have been unconscious from shock and blood loss.

But pain didn’t matter right now. Physical damage was irrelevant. His body would heal or it wouldn’t—the Dullahan virus would repair what it could, and if some injuries proved too severe, then he’d simply operate through them until they became fatal. Nothing was more important than this moment, this confrontation, this opportunity to make Jason pay for what he’d done to Jasmine.

The sound-based disruption technique Jason was employing was clearly problematic, though. Ryan recognized that much even through his emotional numbness. The ability to disorient opponents at precisely the right moment gave Jason a significant tactical advantage in close combat, especially against opponents whose enhanced abilities required concentration and precise timing to activate.

But Ryan had anticipated exactly this kind of attack. He’d watched the Screamer fight, studied its patterns, analyzed its capabilities during his previous encounters with the creature. And he’d specifically prepared counters for the sonic techniques that Jason would inevitably possess after integrating the alien core.

Ryan’s response was executed with precision, his body moving easily. He punched forward with his own fist, matching Jason’s attack with perfect timing.

Jason’s smirk widened as he saw Ryan’s counterpunch coming—a straightforward, predictable response that played exactly into what Jason had expected. His sonic disruption had clearly worked, forcing Ryan into a simple exchange of blows rather than the more complex techniques he usually favored.

But the smirk froze on Jason’s face when Ryan’s head suddenly tilted sideways at the last possible instant—a minimal movement, barely more than an inch of displacement, but perfectly calculated to allow Jason’s fist to whistle harmlessly past his cheek rather than connecting with bone and tissue.

Jason tried to adjust his own defensive positioning, but his momentum was already committed. His body was moving forward with such velocity that course corrections were difficult, his enhanced strength actually working against him by making his attack pattern more rigid and predictable.

Ryan’s fist was also dodged by Jason through a desperate last-second twist of his torso—but then Jason realized with dawning horror that Ryan’s fist hadn’t been targeting his face at all.

Ryan’s hand changed trajectory mid-strike with fluid grace, fingers spreading and grip shifting from the closed fist of a punch to the open hand of a grappling technique. His palm connected with Jason’s right shoulder with precise force, the impact point calculated with surgical accuracy to produce maximum structural damage.

The shoulder joint was complex and delicate despite its apparent strength—a ball-and-socket arrangement held in place by ligaments, tendons, and muscles that could be compromised with the right application of force at the right angle. And Ryan knew exactly how to exploit that vulnerability.

"Nguh!" The pained grunt that tore from Jason’s throat was involuntary and visceral, his body responding to catastrophic joint damage before his brain could process what had happened. His shoulder dislocated with a sickening pop that was audible even over the ambient noise of burning buildings and artificial screams echoing through Jackson Township.

The sensation was indescribable—not just pain, though there was certainly plenty of that, but a fundamental wrongness as bone separated from socket and nerves were stretched beyond their tolerance limits. His right arm suddenly felt disconnected from his body, dangling uselessly as the neural pathways that controlled it misfired and sparked with error messages.

But Ryan wasn’t finished. This wasn’t a single attack meant to create distance or gain tactical advantage—this was the beginning of a systematic dismantling of Jason’s enhanced body, piece by piece, joint by joint, until nothing remained but broken meat and alien crystal.

Ryan’s hand closed around Jason’s wrist like an iron shackle as his own body moved past Jason’s face, using the momentum of their mutual attacks to position himself perfectly for the next phase. With ease, he yanked Jason’s captured arm downward and backward, pulling Jason off-balance and exposing his torso completely.

Then, with his free hand, Ryan clenched his right fist. Wind began to swirl around the closed fingers immediately—not the gentle breezes of natural air currents, but razor-sharp blades of compressed atmosphere that could slice through steel like butter. The wind coalesced into visible streams of distorted air that wrapped around his knuckles, creating a vortex of cutting edges that hummed with barely contained destructive potential.

Jason’s eyes widened with genuine fear as he recognized what was coming. He immediately tried to raise his left arm—his only remaining functional limb—to block or deflect the incoming attack. But his dislocated shoulder sent waves of agony through his system with every movement, and he discovered too late that the injury had compromised his entire right side’s mobility. The complex web of muscles and nerves that controlled his torso couldn’t function properly when his shoulder joint was displaced, leaving his defensive capabilities severely reduced.

"Fuck!!" The expletive burst from Jason’s lips thick with rage and terror in equal measure. In desperation, he did the only thing he could—opened his mouth and released another Scream, this one more powerful and sustained than the brief disruption burst he’d used before.

The sonic assault struck Ryan at point-blank range with devastating force. His expression twitched again, facial muscles spasming as the sound vibrated through his skull and rattled his brain inside its protective case of bone. Blood began trickling from his ears where the pressure had ruptured his eardrums—injuries that would heal eventually through the Dullahan virus’s regenerative properties, but which left him effectively deaf for the moment.

Blood also dripped from his nose in a steady stream, capillaries in his nasal cavity bursting from the pressure differential created by the sonic weapon. The pain must have been extraordinary—like hot needles being driven through his ear canals and into his brain—but Ryan’s expression barely changed beyond that single involuntary twitch.

He held on. Pushed through. Refused to let something as trivial as pain or sensory damage stop him from completing the attack he’d committed to.

Ryan’s wind-blade-coated fist struck Jason’s chest with tremendous force, missing the silver stone embedded there by mere inches—whether through purposeful precision or simple luck was impossible to determine. The impact point was just to the left of the alien core, catching Jason’s pectoral muscle and the ribs beneath with enough power to crack bone and pulverize tissue.

But the real damage came from the wind blades themselves. They tore through Jason’s flesh with surgical efficiency, creating deep lacerations that spiraled outward from the impact point in geometric patterns. Skin peeled away in strips, muscle fiber separated along its grain, blood vessels ruptured and sprayed their contents across both combatants.

Jason was struck backward by the force of the blow, his feet leaving the ground as he skidded across the ash-covered terrain. He tumbled and rolled, unable to control his trajectory, before finally coming to a stop several yards away from where the exchange had occurred.

Immediately he convulsed, then spat blood—not the thin, watery blood of minor injuries, but thick arterial blood that suggested serious internal damage. His chest had been torn open in places, ribs visible through the lacerations, the silver stone’s eerie glow now illuminated by firelight filtering through the wounds in his torso.

But when Jason raised his gaze from the ground where he’d fallen, what he saw made his blood run even colder than the pain in his chest.

Ryan was already rushing toward him.

Not walking. Not approaching cautiously to assess the damage and plan the next attack. Rushing with single-minded determination, his grey eyes fixed on Jason with that same cold, empty expression.

Jason flinched—an involuntary full-body recoil that spoke volumes about how thoroughly Ryan’s assault had shaken him. And then, even more damning, his expression twisted into something ugly as his body took a step backward without any conscious input from his mind.

He’d retreated. Instinctively, automatically, driven by fear responses buried so deep in his nervous system that even the alien stone’s influence couldn’t completely suppress them.

"YOU!!!" Jason’s voice was absolutely thick with rage—fury at Ryan for reducing him to this state, fury at himself for showing fear, fury at the universe for making him feel small and weak despite all the power he’d gained.

The silver stone in his chest responded to his emotional state, glowing with intensity that was almost blinding. Energy poured through Jason’s body in visible waves, his entire form beginning to glow with that same eerie silver light. The illumination made his wounds look even more horrific—light shining through torn flesh and exposed bone like he was some kind of macabre lantern.

His body began to vibrate then, muscles trembling and spasming as power built to critical levels. The vibration intensified rapidly, becoming violent enough that dust and ash shook loose from his clothes and hair. The effect made him look unstable, like he might fly apart at any moment from the forces being channeled through his human frame.

Then Jason clenched his right fist with such force that bones creaked audibly, and struck outward powerfully through empty air in Ryan’s direction.

The punch didn’t physically connect—Jason was still too far away for the strike to reach Ryan’s body directly. But physical contact wasn’t the point of this technique. As Jason’s fist reached full extension, he released a concentrated burst of sonic energy from the point of impact, creating a shockwave that propagated through the air like a bullet made of sound.

The effect was extraordinary and terrifying. The atmosphere itself seemed to explode around Jason’s fist, producing a visible distortion in the air as pressure waves radiated outward. The sound was like a bomb detonating at close range—a sharp, ear-shattering CRACK followed by rolling thunder that echoed off every surface for blocks around.

The sonic projectile shot toward Ryan with frightening velocity, invisible except for the way it distorted the air and kicked up ash in its wake. It was fast—faster than most humans could track visually, faster than most enhanced humans could dodge even with superhuman reflexes.

Ryan’s grey eyes tracked the incoming attack with cold focus. His hearing had been dulled to near-nothing by the previous sonic assaults—his ruptured eardrums still healing, the delicate structures of his inner ear damaged and distorted. His other senses too had been compromised to varying degrees by accumulated injuries and exhaustion.

But his eyes remained sharp as ever. Perhaps even sharper now that his other senses had been reduced, forcing his visual processing to compensate for what his ears and nose and tactile senses could no longer provide him with reliable information about.

Jason’s smirk returned, confidence flooding back as he watched his sonic projectile close the distance. Ryan wasn’t summoning his wind blade defense, wasn’t raising barriers or attempting evasive maneuvers. Perhaps he’d exhausted that particular ability in his previous attack. Even if he somehow had reserves remaining, there was no way a wind-based defense could stop a sonic shockwave—the physics simply didn’t work that way.

That was what Jason thought, at least, until his gaze focused more carefully on Ryan’s face and everything inside him froze with instinctive terror.

Ryan’s left eye—previously that same dull grey color as his right, empty and emotionless—had changed. The iris now glowed with an eerie dark green luminescence that seemed to pulse with its own internal light source. The color was wrong in ways that went beyond mere aesthetics—it was a shade of green that shouldn’t exist in nature, that hurt to look at directly, that triggered deep primal warnings about things that were toxic or diseased or fundamentally alien.

"Wh...What is that?"